While not all social media platforms have accessible interfaces, there’s nothing stopping social media marketers from creating accessible content and becoming advocates for inclusive social media. After all, you want as many people as possible to be able to enjoy your social presence, right?

Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

What is inclusive design?

Inclusive design methods aim to deliver an amazing user experience to as many people as possible. In practice, that means shifting away from one-size-fits-all solutions for the “average user.”

Instead, inclusive design accounts for a range of diversity—including ability, language, gender, age, and other factors—by creating a variety of ways for people to engage.

The best inclusive design solutions start with edge cases (those with the most extreme or rare needs) as a basis for innovation. At Microsoft Design, this approach translates into their motto: “Solve for one, extend to many.”

Closed captions are a prime example of this in practice. Not only do captions assist people with hearing impairments, they also help language learners, and enhance viewing in low or no-sound environments.

Why accessibility matters for social media

A social media strategy without inclusive design considerations will miss out on connecting with a large audience.

A recent survey of Facebook users in 50 countries found that more than 30 percent of people report difficulty with at least one of the following: seeing, hearing, speaking, organizing thoughts, walking, or grasping with their hands.

Worse still, non-inclusive content and experiences will push people away. And it’s not always easy to pinpoint when that’s happening. Excluded web visitors often don’t complain: 71 percent will just leave.

Keeping social media accessible means recognizing exclusion, learning from your followers, and presenting information in the clearest ways possible. And at the end of the day, that’s just being a good social media marketer or manager.

11 inclusive design tips for social media managers

1. Make text as readable as possible

Accessible copy is simple copy, and simple copy is effective copy.

Clear and direct text helps a variety of readers, including those using assistive technology like screen readers and those still learning the language you are posting in.

Here are some inclusive design tips for text:

Don’t overuse caps. Full-caps can be difficult to read and misinterpreted by screen readers.

Use camel case for multi-word hashtags. This makes hashtags more legible, more compatible with screen readers, and also prevents gaffs like #Susanalbumparty.

Put hashtags and mentions at the end. Punctuation marks are read aloud by screen readers, so hashtags or @ mentions can disrupt copy.

Limit emoji use. Emoji also get read aloud by assistive tech. That means people will hear things like “loudly crying face” or “face with closed eyes and stuck out tongue.”

Use an adequate font size. Make sure font is legible, especially if used in images or places that aren’t modifiable.

Limit line length. Lines that are too long can interfere with readability and retention.

Use True Text when possible. What’s True Text? Think of the difference between a blog post and a scanned PDF. True Text is easier to enlarge and translate. And it’s more compatible with screen readers or other assistive technologies.

2. Provide descriptive captions for images

Descriptive captions and “alternative text” (also known as “alt text”) helps people visualize images. According to WebAIM, a nonprofit with Center for Persons with Disabilities, missing or ineffective alt text is the most problematic aspect of web accessibility.

Convey the content and functionality of the image. There’s a huge gap between “Image of a chart,” and something like, “A bar chart illustrates that there has been a year-over-year increase in forest fires, peaking at 100 this year.”

I’m a blind twitter user. There are a lot of us out there. Increase your ability to reach us and help us interact with your pictures, it’s really simple and makes a huge difference to our twitter experiance allowing us to see your images our way. Thanks for the description ???? pic.twitter.com/hCsjoFdmev

Facebook and YouTube provide auto-captioning options, whereas Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat require that captions be burned in or encoded in advance.

4. Add a descriptive transcript for video

Unlike captions, which are usually a transcript of spoken dialogue, descriptive language denotes the important sights and sounds that are not spoken.

For example, without adding: “A man enters the room and turns off the oven,” a visually impaired viewer may be confused when the new character suddenly says, “You’re going to burn the house down.”

There are a few ways to provide descriptions:

Descriptive audio. Described video is the narrated description of any important non-verbal elements in your video. This track is written and recorded so that it fits within the gaps between important audio elements. On social media, described video is typically “baked in” and cannot be turned off.

Descriptive transcript. Sometimes referred to as a media alternative transcript, a descriptive transcript provides descriptions along with dialogue, much like a script.

Live described video. Facebook Live video hosts should be familiar with descriptive video techniques, taking pauses to describe what’s happening on screen. Accessible Media Inc. has created a guide for describing live.

Hotels.com took descriptive captions and ran with them, picking up a Facebook Gold Award in 2016.

5. Use a color contrast of at least 4.5:1

For people who are colorblind, or even those who’ve switched to grayscale to ward off the dopamine delivered by red notifications, color contrast is important.

The ideal contrast between a text color and its background should be at least 4.5 to 1, as instructed by WCAG. For larger text that ratio decreases, but it increases for smaller text.

Avoid green and red or blue and yellow combinations, as they’re difficult to read.

Text can be difficult to read on images, so consider using a solid background or opaque overlay.

On graphs and charts, consider also using patterns to differentiate data.

6. Don’t rely on color for meaning

Almost one in seven people have some form of vision impairment, ranging from colorblindness to low vision, near vision, or blindness. In fact, Facebook’s color scheme is blue because its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is red-green colorblind.

Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

A post shared by The Economist (@theeconomist) on Nov 24, 2018 at 6:05am PST

7. Avoid placeholder text for forms

A clear and descriptive form will always have a better completion and conversion rate than a poor form.

Placeholder text is often used instead of labels, but this can pose usability issues. Placeholders save space, but they are often low in contrast. Disappearing placeholders can make forms harder to review and strain people’s short-term memory, which is probably not your goal.

Labels tell people what information is required. They are often read to people who use screen readers, further underscoring their importance.

Submit Feedback for Facebook accessibility if a follower reports difficulty.

Did you know that you can view and override Facebook's automatic alt text on desktop? You can write your own alt text! It even throws a warning that says, "alt text is usually less than 100 characters." Cool feature, @fbaccess, #a11ypic.twitter.com/zDhkGtbUOo

Instagram Accessibility Tips

Instagram does not offer alternative text features for images or videos. Make sure to provide descriptive Instagram captions instead.

Add captions to your video. Videos must be encoded with captions pre-upload.

Use camel-case for hashtags to make them more readable.

Twitter Accessibility Tips

Make sure you provide appropriate contrast between the background, avatar and bio on your account page.

Enable image descriptions. Follow these steps to add the ability to describe images for the visually impaired. Now you’re all set to add descriptions to your photos. Descriptions can be 420 characters long. They are also available in TweetDeck.

YouTube Accessibility Tips

Provide closed captions and audio descriptions on all videos.

YouTube provides automatic captioning for livestream and videos on demand. If you use this feature, make sure to read through the captions to ensure accuracy. It’s always better to create custom captions when possible.

Snapchat Accessibility Tips

Make sure there is enough contrast between captions and the background.

9. Be thoughtful about representation

Barriers to inclusion are not just physical. If your brand uses photos or illustrations of people, representation should be top of mind.

It’s a basic marketing principle that brands should create content their audience can see themselves in. But too often brands over-represent young, white, straight, able-bodied, cis-gender men in their imagery. Not only does this often miss the mark, it can also marginalize those who don’t fit that description.

Consider role assignment and portrayal as well. Are women always doing the cleaning? Is romance always heterosexual? Before posting any image to social media, make sure it is not promoting racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic, or other stereotypes.

10. Plan to test and iterate often

It’s rare to get everything right on the first try. Author Jim Benson said on Twitter: “Software being “done” is like a lawn being “mowed.”” Take the same approach to maintaining an inclusive social media presence.

Take advantage of tools like Color Oracle to simulate color blindness. Read alt-text aloud – or better yet, use a screen reader or other types of assistive technology to test your content. A full list of helpful tools is included below.

11. Embrace feedback

As Google’s senior designer Kara Gates says, “If you want to change the world you have to include it.”

If your team lacks diversity, seek out other ways to include different perspectives. Listen to your audience and request feedback often. Be open – not defensive – to the feedback you receive. And make sure your contact information is easy for followers to find.

Social media accessibility tools

WAVE Browser extensions

Readability Test Tool

The Readability Test Tool scores the readability level of your copy. Add a link to a URL or test by direct input.

Contrast App

If you use a Mac, Contrast app is a WCAG-compliant contrast checker. A nice feature about this app is that it allows designers to check their contrast scores as they select colors. The creators of this app even provide a guide that simplifies WCAG guides.

Contrast Checker

Contrast Checker lets you drag and drop a specific image for a contrast check, which is a good thing to do before uploading assets to social media.

Please Caption Bot

Dragon Speech Recognition

Use Dragon Speech Recognition to transcribe an audio or video recording. Make sure to review the finished transcript for errors before sharing.

Overstream

Overstream is a free subtitle editor that allows you to create video captions from scratch, or can be used to edit existing YouTube captions.

YouDescribe

YouDescribe, by the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute allows volunteer describers to create descriptive audio for YouTube videos. Simply copy and paste a YouTube url into the search field and click Create/Edit Descriptions to get started.

Videos can also be paused for extended audio description for when there’s not a long enough natural gap in the soundtrack.

Manage all your social media channels from one dashboard using Hootsuite. Easily schedule and publish all of your inclusively-designed social media posts, engage with your followers, and track the success of your efforts. Try it free today.